Over 1900 Lost Pictures with Lightroom/Mac :(

Hi all, we just returned from our first Indonesian adventure and had a fantastic time. I did however, run into a serious problem. I'm not sure what the issue is, if it's a Lightroom 4 issue or a Mac issue, so I'll just outline the problem.

I'm new to Mac, about a year and a half. I've been using Lightroom on Windows for 5 years now. My process has always been to download my pics directly from my SD card into Lightroom. Up until now I have had the occasional file show up in my library as "Missing". After 10 days of downloading pics on this trip, one afternoon over 1900 were missing. The actual message on the pic thumbnails reads... "The file named "..."
is offline or missing" On the thumbnail there is also a question mark in the upper lefthand corner. The night before these files dissapeared, I returned from dinner and opened up my Mac book. What I saw was temporary folders popping up out of thin nair on the desktop, then dissapear?? Virus?? The next day, the 1900 pics were gone. Now.... out of those 1900 pics there are a handful that are still there. There are also a few pics that were taken last year still there also. There is a folder in the left hand directory on the Lightroom library menu that actually says "Missing Photographs"

Since the incident I talked to a few folks and they seem to think that the files are just somehow unlinked from lightroom, that they were somehow stored outside Lightroom by the system. Not being that Mac savvy, I'm not sure how to find them. I've tried general HD searches for the file names with no results. Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated, lost are all of our Bali diving and land pics My next step....if we can't figure it out, is taking it in to the Apple store and hope ffor a miracle.

P.S. Also, I have another long time issue I'm wondering how folks deal with. I get quite frustrated trying to develop pics in lightroom on one computer, and then posting them online only to look like crap on another computer. I've tried calibrating my monitors in the past, but it doesn't seem to help. Now, I see plenty of other my friends and other folks posting pics that I see on on multiple puters that look just fantastic on them all? What am I missing???? Thanks in advance!!

I think you still have them somewhere and some how they became unlinked. If I were you I would go to Flicker and find the most popular Lightroom group and look through their most frequently asked questions and if that didn't get you an answer call the Adobe help desk. I am sure there is an answer at both of those places. When I was fairly new to lightroom I had the same thing happen. I was able to find my pic but lost edits on about 7000 photos. I wish I had asked one of these to places I mentioned before I messed things up even further.

HI Greg, when you imported your photos from the card to Lightroom you would have had to choose a folder location for them on your Mac somewhere. Can't you just navigate to that folder by going to your Mac HD and then navigating there? That will show you the folder and if they are there

it sounds as though they have unlinked. i had the same issue on PC when i moved to a new laptop. i then had to ensure that they were all in the right place and reimport them to LR. i now download them to my HDD and verify where they are and then import them into LR. They are then backed up onto a seperate portable HDD.

Hi Greg,
Which action did you make while importing ?
Add : leave the files where they are, and just make a new entry in LR's catalogue
Copy : copy the files on a hard disk location that you have to choose and make an entry in LR's catalogue for each image
Move : same as above, except that the file is deleted on the media of origin.
Should you have selected the Add action, your pictures are still on your SD or CF card ...

Mike - If I'm understanding you, you're asking the root path? If so, this is the catalog path...

/Users/Admin/pictures/lightroom

Catalog name is...

Lightroom 4 catalog.Ircat

In this catalog, I have about 20 subfolders, half of those are folders with the question marks and missing pics. Previews are still present in the library though.

Cary - Great idea and thanks for the contact! The folks over at the LR flicker group have been helping, but so far nothing conclusive. I'll check the LR forums Okuna mentions also, thanks Okuna

Erik - I've tried searching filenames through the finder search. Problem is, because of the way I import daily, I have files with the same number designation. Just different dates. As far as I know, and I'm a Mac dummy for sure, is that the search feature in the finder is the only one? As far as "Why" they got moved...maybe we'll figure that out if we find the missing files? I still think about the virus angle too.... I mean, I've never seen a computer do what it did that night. Creating and deleting multiple temporary folders on my desktop...just while I was watching and not doing anything?? Is that a normal Mac thing??? It was that next day the issues popped up...so just a thought.

David - I've always imported them using the import function in LR straight from the SD card. Now, of course, I know to do it differntly. Like I mentioned though, I've been doing it this way for 5 years and this is the first time I've had this kind of issue. I utilize the same couple of SD cards for my whole trip, which means basicly I'm importing then reformatting the cards daily.

I assume you know this but... When you import to Lightroom, your files are not going into LR at all; they are being referenced to the LR catalogue from wherever you keep them on your computer. So normally, one would copy the pictures to a folder on your hard drive, then import to LR from that folder. The picture files themselves aren't going into the LR catalogue. If you just import from the SD card and don't have the "Make a second copy to" box checked so that LR will copy your files somewhere permanent, you lose your pictures when you format the card.

Go to the import page and see if this box is ticked, and where it says your files might be saved...

In future, copy to a folder of your hard drive, back up to an external drive, and then import from the internal drive.

Thanks Steve, you are right. To clarify, LR allows you to transfer the files from your SD card to somewhere on the computer, make a backup copy to another location on your computer AND import to LR at the same time. If you set that up in the Import screen.

The confusion comes from the word "import". It implies a transfer of files when there is only referencing of files.

Interests:Protecting our Ocean, Environmental Education,
Having fun and Living Well

Posted 26 May 2013 - 11:10 PM

Hey Pete,

You have the choice to also transfer the files during import, you can Copy the files from the card to a new location, Move them to a new location or Add them to LR without moving them (which is the referencing you speak of). My workflow is to copy off the card to my laptop hard drive and backup to a portable hard drive during the import to LR. With the original CF card that gives me 3 copies of the image to travel with. (All in different cases)

i first copy them to a folder structured like year/country//yyyymmdd-name of the location.NEF.

This seems clumsy, but this helps me to know and find the files as i can search them regarding their date.

After they are copied to the drive i import them in a Lightroom catalogue in the same year directory,

to speed up the work as LR becomes slow(er) having about 50'000 raw pictures in it.

I have one catalogue containing all pictures i only use to find a certain picture i can't remember it's date.

The other reason is also that i know that al pictures are on my D: drive and when i run a backup i am sure that all pictures are included. On a PC Lightroom uses the c:/user/ directory by default as location to store the pictures and the catalogue files but this is not recommended as it is the system drive and this should not be filled up with data files.